L ifestyles /C ulture
Reviews: Memories, Money Considered
B OOKS
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
‘What Happened Here?’
“The Memory Monster”
Yishai Sarid
Restless Books
AT THE INTERSECTION
of Arch Street and the
Benjamin Franklin Parkway,
an Israeli flag flaps above the
Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust
Memorial Plaza. If you’re just
driving by, the sculpture in the
center of the plaza, “Monument
to Six Million Jewish Martyrs,”
looks like a Lovecraftian horror,
or “The Thing” — seemingly
disembodied limbs and faces
straining out of a tower of flames.

Look more closely, and
you see a Torah, too. A fully
formed man with tefillin on
his forehead stretches his arms,
and two sword-wielding hands
arise at the peak of the fire. The
swords and the blue-barred
flag may as well represent the
same thing: Out of the fire and
the chaos of the Holocaust, an
iron people emerged, ready to
defend themselves.

Yishai Sarid’s “The Memory
Monster,” a 2017 Israeli novel
translated into English by
Yardenne Greenspan, released
this fall, is concerned with the
world these iron people have
created. What did it mean, for
Israelis, Jews and all of us, really,
to meld together Israel and the
Holocaust? It’s not simply a
question of facts and figures for
Sarid’s narrator, an unnamed
Israeli historian, but a question
about our peculiar inheritance,
which is adjusted and redefined
with each bequest.

Sarid, the son of longtime
Israeli politician Yossi Sarid, is a
lawyer and the author of five other
novels. His questions are piercing,
and his answers, even more so.

The novel takes the form of
a letter from the historian to
the chairman of the board of
22 OCTOBER 8, 2020
Yad Vashem, whom the histo-
rian holds in great esteem. The
feeling was once mutual, but
this is evidently no longer so.

The letter, then, is the histori-
an’s opportunity to “provide a
report of what happened here.”
“At first, I tried to separate
myself from the report and
convey it in a clean, academic
fashion, without bringing in
my own personality or my
private life, which, in and
of themselves, are nothing
worthy of discussion,” he
writes. “But after writing only
a few lines, I realized that was
impossible.” It can be easy to
lose track of the fact that the
story is progressing within a
letter, which begs the question
of whether the epistolary struc-
ture is necessary.

The historian relays the
arc of his professional life, a
middling academic career that
began as a choice between a
funnel to military intelligence
(Persian history) or Holocaust
studies. He chooses the latter,
declaring that he is “ready to
harness himself to the memory
chariot.” He becomes freakishly
adept at recalling the columns
of long-gone Jewish towns, the
names of Bavarian function-
aries and methods of efficient
extermination that make up
the Holocaust as it is taught.

Befitting a person with such
powers of recall, he becomes a
tour guide, leading travelers and
student groups at Yad Vashem,
and then, for much more
money, through Auschwitz,
Majdanek and the former sites
of Jewish life in Poland.

What he finds on these
tours is scarier to him than
anything he’d found in his
studies, deadened as he is to
the human realities of the
Holocaust. The students, if
they’re paying attention at all,
whisper that such measures
should be taken against “the
Arabs”; he’s used as a prop by
bored politicians, as a wind-up
‘The Memory Monster’ by Yishai Sarid
Courtesy of Restless Books
fact doll by glib tourists and as
an unwitting participant in a
renowned German director’s
documentary, inspiring an act
of violence for which the letter
is an explanation. All sense of
sanctity is pared away from his
project. Worst of all, his obsession
turns him into a piece of the
Memory Monster, a wriggling
life form that’s jumped from
the awful host. Consumed
by the Nazi calculation of
humanity, he finds himself
unable to hide his admira-
tion for the German people
and comes to agree with the
student who tells his class that
they must all become “a little
bit Nazi” if they are to survive
this world. He doesn’t fall
apart, but becomes something
new and terrible to behold.

Sarid has a sharp eye for the
uses and abuses of Holocaust
memory in Israel, but his book
is more than a critique of his
own country (and, of course,
a good story). It’s the work of
a lawyer, preparing us for the
JEWISH EXPONENT
‘The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The
History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution’ by Lila Corwin
Berman Courtesy of Princeton University Press
In other words, she wants to
next bequest, asking: What are
we planning to do with all of make clear that her questions
and findings about Jewish
this? groups and their relationships
to power in the United States
Jews and Their Money
are not meant to function as
an “attempt to name or reify
“The American Jewish
something called Jewish
Philanthropic Complex: The
power,” but rather, a good-faith
History of a Multibillion-
deeply researched study of the
Dollar Institution”
ever-changing Jewish inter-
Lila Corwin Berman
action with power over the
Princeton University Press
course of a long period. That’s
Lila Corwin Berman gave a tough needle to thread. But
herself the unenviable task Berman, in her furious focus
of writing about Americans on her subject, makes a clean
Jewish institutions and their stitch.

The thesis of the book is
financial maneuvers over the
course of about two centuries. that American Jewish philan-
Berman, a professor and the thropic institutions, like all
philanthropic director of the Feinstein Center American
for American Jewish History at institutions, have become
Temple University, writes in the a “complex” — an inten-
introduction to her new book tional echo of Eisenhower’s
that she wants her scholarship description of the military-in-
to “make it impossible — or at dustrial-complex in 1961. In
least, an act of willful blind- their co-development with the
ness — to confuse a diffuse modern American regulatory
category of people with a turgid state, with all of its financial
and fraught abstraction about complexity, American Jewish
philanthropic institutions have
the totality of their power.”
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